srijeda, 11. rujna 2013.

Land of Kush - The Big Mango (2013)

"Sam Shalabi has raised the bar for modern psychedelic music by
composing this epic suite for his 20-piece Land of Kush orchestra. By
utilizing African, Middle Eastern, Indian, jazz, rock, and folkloric
sources, The Big Mango weaves a seamless montage of styles in a
transcendent way that is rarely, if ever, achieved. A singular cohesive
statement built around five key tracks written for five different female
vocalists…it will demand your attention from start to finish." – Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls / Sublime Frequencies).

Following several visits to the city over the years, Osama (Sam)
Shalabi moved to Cairo in 2011, arriving at an apartment one block from
Tahrir Square, in the midst of Egypt's 'Arab Spring'. Shalabi describes
The Big Mango, his new and phenomenal work for his Land Of Kush
big-band, as "a love letter to Cairo" framed by "the beautiful, surreal
madness of the city…as joyous, horrific, historical events were
unfolding". The music was also inspired by time spent in Dakar – a
break from the unrelenting intensity of Cairo – where in Senegal's music
scene Sam experienced parallels to another of his important aesthetic
and political touchstones, Brazilian Tropicalia. The sense of a
"positivity, complexity and radicalism in art that was also playful and
joyous and wasn't necessarily part of a 'revolution' but seemed to be a
form of innate radicalism" – in tandem with the relative openness of
Dakar's Islamic society, where the role and presence of women in public
and private life, and the relaxed physicality and sensuality of the
culture in general – offered a powerful counterpoint and feeling of
promise for Egypt's own future. The Big Mango is one of the many
nicknames for Cairo, but also evokes the sweetness, succour and
sensuality of southern hemispheric music more generally, in its
aforementioned relation to broader socio-political movements.
Montréal remains Shalabi's home base in many respects, and the place
to which he briefly returned towards the end of 2012 to reconvene the
large troupe of players that have helped him realize his large-scale
orchestral works under the Land Of Kush moniker. Working through The Big
Mango score with these local musicians culminated in two ecstatic live
performances and a recording session at Montréal's Hotel2Tango studio.
This third album by Land Of Kush is arguably the group's most focused
and effortlessly rewarding.
The Big Mango kicks off in typically bizarre and uncategorizably
Kush fashion, with a slowly brewing stew of free-improvised
instrumentation, electronics, wordless vocalizations and oblique
sexuality/sensuality through the opening two tracks, "Faint Praise" and
"Second Skin". These opening six minutes are an inimitable
destabilizing strategy of Shalabi's – his lysergic take on an orchestra
'warming up' – that serves to introduce most of the instrumental voices
and the montage of genres that will form the rest of the work, while
also invoking the album's deeper conceptual preoccupations: gender,
sexuality and the status of women as a culture unleashes
seismic/revolutionary energies with the real possibility of attendant
shifts in civil society and political structure.
For Shalabi, gender and Arab culture has been a central theme, one
he took up explicitly on the previous Kush album Monogamy (2011), and
which unquestionably drives The Big Mango, where once again a series of
female vocalists drawn from Montréal's indie rock community anchor the
work and convey what in most of the North African Arab world remains an
utterly radical spirit of gender equality, expression and liberation.
The natural and implicit libidinal energy of rock and roll long
since taken for granted in the West is re-situated in The Big Mango,
where the album's centerpiece songs –"The Pit", "Mobil Nil", Drift
Beguine" and the album's closing title track – are each highlighted by
superlative, propulsive female vocal performances (and
individually-authored lyrics) by Ariel Engle, Katie Moore, Elizabeth
Anka Vajagic and Molly Sweeney respectively. Underpinning each of these
singers is some of Shalabi's most melodically and rhythmically
satisfying writing, conjuring a post-modern psychedelia that is truly
sui generis. The Kush band delivers the grooves and soloists unleash
excursions more fluidly than ever; for many of these players, it's the
third time around embracing Sam's music, getting inside the score, and
following his conduction. In combination with the peaking intensity and
electricity of Shalabi's compositional vision, The Big Mango coheres,
sparkles and soars: a distillation of the sonic trajectory Land Of Kush
has been charting for the past five years. cstrecords.com/

There’s nothing wrong with your stereo. Your iPod isn’t about to burn
up, suddenly shrouded in a black, polluted cloud, with the unhealthy,
sour smell of electricity and burning plastic invading the sense of
smell and a million dying transistors squirming on the desk in front of
you. It might cause you to panic at first, but there is no fault to
worry about; Land of Kush have dropped in.
Shipwrecked, you arrive on the tropical paradise of ‘Faint Praise’,
but the natives are restless. The crackling of the flame licks against
the ear like natural music, but the rising smoke also gives the locals
an indication that an unwanted settlement has cropped up and invaded
their land. Any prospect of peace amongst the slack of the palm-trees
quickly extinguishes itself with the close, exotic grunts of a wild
animal, drawn by the scent of barbequed food, come to check out the
party for itself. The bright green streaks of face-paint are covered
like that of a soldier in the middle of a war-zone, accompanying the
feminine scream in what is an unsettling call to her native tribe.
The piano lines conjure up a fearful feeling – we really shouldn’t be
here – and from ‘Second Skin’ onwards the tone has been set. What was a
bright, blue day on the island of paradise turns into an unexpected,
exciting cluster-fuck of experimental noise. It started with the
calling, and the first assault on the innocence of silence, acted out by
some kind of ancient pipe, ominous in its throaty texture, dirtied by
gravel.
Peaceful openings are suddenly wrenched aside by the brutal force of a
power-hungry military force. In reality, the tropical island is
geographically distant, but its troubles are shared the world over; many
a real-world location suffers from the plague of consistent violence.
It may come as no surprise, then, to note that The Big Mango is inspired
by and dedicated to the city of Cairo, itself plagued by recent
violence and unprecedented civil unrest.
The deep, passionate cry for her new found liberty in her democratic
infancy has now turned sour, instead becoming a cry of anguish and of
lost hope, when all looked promising. The revolution also kick-started,
and perhaps subconsciously promoted, a power vacuum, and paved the way
for opportunistic groups looking to fuel the fire. The paradise isle
shares Cairo’s smoke screen of justice and democracy with its own
illusion of peace. Locked in the struggle for control are the multiple
instruments, with vocalists singing authentic songs that feature a
traditional verse and a fiery chorus.
The plethora of instrumentation de-stabilizes the rhythmic region,
creating some beautiful carnage. The chaos could be a mirrored
reflection of past scars that continue to haunt much of the Middle East
as a whole. The region is, and always has been, a hotbed for religious
and cultural reasons. Thousands of years later, nothing much has
changed. The simmering instruments rebound off each other in a chaotic,
yet structured order; the collective manage to coalesce every instrument
into a well-rounded whole. More than twenty Montreal musicians play on
The Big Mango; in some places, it sounds as if all twenty are playing at
once, but the wheels never tumble off. One of the least used – and
often neglected – musical elements comes to the fore here – fun! Yes,
it’s that easy.
It may be the sudden key change and chord progression that sounds out
the end of ‘The Pit, Part 1’, or the twinkling, semi-tone rap on the
piano keys that conjures up a fearful mood, as if the listener were
checking out a haunted refrigerator in a swanky New York apartment
(think Ghostbusters). The Big Mango could be a replacement for The Big
Apple.
Land of Kush drape the western song format over Middle Eastern
harmonies. The strict, rhythmic chord progression of an electric guitar
fits in nicely, succinctly and sweetly. The western flavour is down to
the line-up of female vocalists, summoned from the indie rock scene of
Montreal. The ghosts are heavy loaded guitars, running across a phantom
stage.
Loaded with action-packed pieces, the music doesn’t waste any time
getting down, knives at the ready – the record’s immediacy is
impressive. The finale, ‘The Big Mango’ has turned full circle, 360
degrees. Fire-fuelled electric guitars smash through power chords like
tanks of gasoline, but there are a couple of tasty arpeggiated sections
to steer the listener through. There’s even some kind of solo, one
that’s been banished from indie rock for its insane tendencies. The
ending then tunes itself into an ancient, Middle Eastern drone, with
only the feminine vocal able to make the jump to safety, spears as
arrows on the shore. - James Catchpole www.fluid-radio.co.uk/

The Big Mango is a nickname for Cairo, and Sam Shalabi has
just made the album that Cairo needs. Recorded during the euphoria of
the Arab Spring, The Big Mango is about to be released in what
some might call the Arab Fall: a time in which hopes have been dashed,
lives have been lost, regimes have been in uproar. This is an intensely
trying time for the people of Egypt, caught in a cycle of indignation,
mourning and despair. Even Shalabi’s stated themes ~ the status of
women in Islamic culture, the idea that radical shifts need not be
threatening ~ are sublimated by the larger story. As “a love letter to
Cairo (and its) beautiful, surreal, madness”, The Big Mango succeeds
through the sheer vibrancy of its music. This album celebrates the
diversity of international culture and sound, sharing a valuable message
that can be universally applied.
The album begins with the sounds of water, traffic, fire and moans, a
disorienting mix that becomes even odder with the addition of wordless
vocals and strings. This tune-up leads to a more accessible
instrumental piece, “Second Skin”, whose piano intro provides the
album’s most western segment. (Despite its pedigree, the album was
recorded in Montreal). After this, the album becomes a happy
free-for-all, as the 20-piece Land of Kush orchestra
gets to strut its stuff. Five female vocalists are on hand, as well as
multiple international instruments, including tabla, barafon, darbuka
and riqq. And look! Constellation perennial Rebecca Foon (Esmerine)
contributes cello as well, blessing the project with her presence.

The super-funky “The Pit (Part 1)” is an early highlight, featuring
savage saxophone, hand-clapping rhythms, groovy vocals (Ariel Engle) and
a sweet breakdown in the final two minutes. This is the sort of music
that begs to be heard live, outdoors, perhaps at a bazaar or local
market. As the tracks bleed into each other, this feeling continues.
As active as the vocalists may be (performing on roughly half of the
tracks), The Big Mango belongs to the multi-ethnic players, who
seem to be just as comfortable lounging around (“Mobil Nil”) as they do
rocking (“Drift Beguine”) or jamming out (“St Stefano”). The Big Mango mixes jazz, funk, global music and improvisation, spotlighting a single word: life.
Cairo may be an injured city right now, in an injured country,
experiencing a tragic loss of life. But life continues to go on, as do
the injured hopes and indomitable spirit of a nation. (Richard Allen)Monogamy (2010)

Sam Shalabi’s Land Of Kush project returns: his psych-arabic jazz
orchestra has produced a second album of intensely genre-defying,
polymorphic, big band madness. Where Shalabi structured last year’s
mesmerising Against The Day album around the Thomas Pynchon
novel of the same name, this time Shalabi tackles concepts of shame,
sexuality and society in a new multi-movement work entitled Monogamy.
Rounding up many of the same Montreal-based improv and experimental players featured on Against The Day,
Shalabi deploys a cast of two dozen musicians and sound artists to
realise this fantastic new compositional hybrid of Middle Eastern tropes
and Western vocabularies of jazz, psychedelia and experimental/free
music. For the Monogamy album, the group has been given it’s own sub-moniker as The Egyptian Light Orchestra.
The band is a truly hydra-headed beast on this recording; string,
brass and woodwinds careen around the drone/backbeat of the major
movements, shifting between short melodic punctuations, free excursions,
and consolidated unison lines. Dissonant piano, synth and electronics
bubble below, above and at the outer limits of the mix. Several
transitions also allow for various players to stretch out in some lovely
virtuosic solo passages. Shalabi’s oud anchors the album’s opening and
closing pieces, as well as the glorious “Tunnel Visions” piece at the
album’s midpoint. The rhythm section – comprising standard trap kits,
upright basses and traditional Eastern percussion – holds down one
hypnotic groove after another.
Shalabi has once again structured his orchestral work to feature
primarily female vocalists who further challenge the categorisation of
the music, conjuring everything from Galas- or Ono-style ululation (“The
1st And The Last”) to cabaret/jazz (“Scars”) to ethereal psych-folk
(“Tunnel Visions”). He also employs a recurring digitally-processed
voice track of “dirty” glossal phrases and cut-ups that interacts
rhythmically and conceptually with the work. This sonic through-line
frames and re-frames the music as psycho-sexual commentary and
narrative, imbuing Monogamy’s many stylistic moments and
movements with a higher conceptual power: frustration/liberation,
chastity/carnality, innocence/shame, purity/impurity. Of course there’s a
‘healthy’ dose of id at play here as well – particularly on
“Fisherman”, where the emotionless, robotic voice takes over in a steady
stream of irreverent, desecrating, potty-mouthed absurdism. The album’s
title track “Monogamy” fittingly rallies the work’s conceptual terrain,
with a gorgeous vocal melody spinning a concise alphabetised summation:

A is for the apple tree
B is for Beelzebub and he’s the snake
C is for the curse of Ham
D is for the drugs that you’re now forced to take
E is for eternity
F is for the fucking that you did outside
G is for the Giving Tree
H is for the Holy Spirit’s bride
And all of this comes out In little birdlike trills
You’ll reach for paper towels
To clean up all your spills - cstrecords.com

"In the most positive way possible, an album which is, in a very
literal sense, all over the place...elements of Middle-Eastern folk
amongst a heavy dose of Western free-jazz, drone and psych-rock. The
end result is a surprisingly coherent and thematically consistent
record. The album never falls short of being sonically fascinating and
if nothing else it serves as a reminder of how great it is that
Constellation Records exists as an outlet for this kind of out-there,
experimental LP." Drowned in Sound

"The orchestration on this record is abundant, with two dozen musicians
directed by a skillful conductor. The timbre and palette oozing with
oriental psychedelia: groovy percussions, woodwinds, electronic drones
and keyboards. All this held together with oud, strings and a healthy
dose of free-jazz. But the music is also focused on songs, with the
presence of four different singers throughout. Maybe it’s the whole idea
of monogamy that made Shalabi pick only female singers for this
release. Elizabeth Anka Vajagic, Molly Sweeny, Katie Moore and Ariel
Engle are the vocalists invited by the composer to share their voices
and writing skills on his peculiar relationship between sex and music.
Each performed and wrote a song with gripping results; beautiful voices
combined with well-thought lyrics, following the conceptual thread of
this release. The closing track of the record is so beautiful that it
almost made me weep." 9/10 Foxy Digitalis

"Sam Shalabi’s combination of Arabic traditional motifs and instruments
with jazz, free improvisation and electronics has moved further out to
truly stretch any notion of genre to breaking point. Land of Kush has
rapidly become Shalabi's best project...sublime: the playing, the
singing and the overall presentation of the music is spot on. Along with
Against the Day, this is certainly one of the most unique albums of recent years." Brainwashed

Sam Shalabi is a musician and composer who has been creating and playing
music in Montréal for the better part of 20 years. Unconstrained by
genre, Sam’s musical history spans rock, jazz, free music, punk, and
most things in-between. A highly truncated list of his projects includes
Shalabi Effect, Detention, Molasses, and Nutsak, along with several
releases under his own name courtesy Alien8Recordings and Squintfucker
Press.
In the last bunch of years Shalabi has been writing and arranging
sprawling compositions for large ensembles, the most recurring of which
is Land Of Kush, incorporating anywhere from 20 to 30-plus Montréal
players and vocalists. Kush includes string, brass, woodwinds, guitar,
and percussion sections, in addition to electronics and Shalabi’s oud.
Shalabi has described earlier hybrid compositional work as “protest music about Arabophobia” (Osama, 2003) after 9/11 and an attempt at modern Arabic pop (Eid,
2008) inspired by an extended stay in Cairo in 2006. Land Of Kush
combines both of these impulses, to our ears, while also rallying Sam’s
long obsessions with psychedelic music (viz. Shalabi Effect) and epic
literary fiction.
Inspired by and named after the Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day,
the music is broken into five sections, named for the book’s chapters.
The three primary movements are centred around solo vocalists (Jason
Grimmer, Molly Sweeney, Radwan Moumneh) who composed their own lyrics
for the piece. In between vocal performances, Shalabi gives the
orchestra ample opportunity to strut its stuff, including solos and long
instrumental passages that display Sam’s unique balance of composition
and ‘expository’ or improvisational instruction.Against The Day is a complex, intense, but accessible hour
of hybrid, genre-defying music. The marriage of middle-eastern, north
African and western modes and influences yields a recording that evades
categorization, by one of Montréal’s most challenging and prolific
musical iconoclasts. - cstrecords.com/

Flatform - Quantum + Trento Symphonia + Movements of an Impossible Time + A Place to Come + Can Not Be Anything Against the Wind + 57.600 Seconds of Invisible Night and Light + Sunday 6th April, 11:42 a.m. + About zero + With Nature There Are no Special Effects, Only Consequences (f)

Ben Rivers - The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes are not Brothers (f)

Cheryl Frances-Hoad - Glory Tree (m)

Thomas Adès - The Twenty-Fifth Hour (m)

Daníel Bjarnason - Over Light Earth + Processions + Solaris (m)

Dobrinka Tabakova - String Paths (m)

Jacek Sienkiewicz - Nomatter (m)

Veli-Matti Puumala - Anna Liisa (m)

Bill Douglas - Trilogy: My Childhood, My Ain Folk, My Way Home (f)

DIALECT - Gowanus Drifts (m)

Robert Enrico - Au coeur de la vie (f)

Kara-lis Coverdale & LXV - Sirens (m)

Uljana Wolf - i mean i dislike that fate that i was made to where (b)

Mempo Giardinelli - Sultry Moon (b)

Jean-Marie Straub - Dialogue d'ombres (f)

Klaus Hoffer - Among the Bieresch (b)

Maxim Biller - U glavi Brune Schulza (b)

Svend Åge Madsen - Days with Diam + Virtue & Vice in the Middle Time (b)